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That “Spoonbridge & Cherry” sculpture has become so iconic of Minneapolis in our minds, we’d nearly forgotten that the Walker’s outdoor annex has only been gracing our city for a decade and a half. The museum’s celebrating the occasion with a two-part weekend fete. On Friday, critic’s-darling Americana combo Wilco headlines a concert backed up by power-jazz trio the Bad Plus, local boys who’re making quite a splash in national jazz circles. Saturday’s free garden party looks like a great day for the kids, with plenty of make-it-yourself art projects and winding up with an end-of-day parade.

The MIA teams up with Britain’s Tate Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art for this 150-work exhibit, a major collection intent on revealing the creative give-and-take between painters on either side of the English Channel during the tumultuous decades of post-Napoleonic Europe. Crossing will feature plenty of rare treats for us Yankee audiences, including masterworks by artists like Eugene Delacroix and J.M.W. Turner rarely shown outside their home museums. The flagship here is Theodore Gericault’s massive “Raft of the Medusa,” the scandalous 1820 work capturing the survivors of a real-life shipwreck just at the moment of rescue, but too late to save them from cannibalism—sometimes considered the definitive painting of its era. It also showed up later as the cover of a Pogues record, which can only be an added bonus. (We won’t be seeing the original painting, too fragile and too jealously guarded to leave the Louvre, but the Tate’s 1859 reproduction has been called “spine-chilling.”) MIA, 2400 3rd Ave. S., (612) 870-3000, artsmia.org

To open its 2003 season, Soap Factory presents a series of video, film, and visual art that’s all about finding and crossing the line between fiction and reality—more specifically, how we use fiction to assemble our reality. Projects include a trading post where you can swap one of your own mixed-tapes with one of Conrad Bakker’s carved wooden replicas—an excellent way to get rid of those old Whitesnake cassettes. Two fascinating documentaries also get local premieres. Hell House takes us behind the scenes of a Texas scare-the-teens-straight Pentecostal haunted house. And The Battle of Orgreave, directed by Leaving Las Vegas’ Mike Figgis, chronicles artist Jeremy Deller’s painstaking historical re-enactment of a bloody 1984 clash between British riot police and striking miners. Soap Factory, 2nd St. S.E. & 5th Ave. S.E., (612) 623-9176, soapfactory.org

Bley represents a new and unique impulse in jazz—a desire to embrace big, messy, intellectual subjects. It’s not a natural mode for jazz, which tends to dwell on aesthetic detail. You know, art for art’s sake. But her latest album, Looking For America, sounds the clarion that jazz is uniquely equipped to approach complex issues like, well, the crazy conflicted country that birthed it. No wonder she’s been compared (favorably) to giants like Ellington and Mingus. And when was the last time you picked up a record—of any genre—that warned “the views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the musicians or the record label”? Northrop, 84 Church St. S.E., northrop.umn.edu

Sometimes you’ve just got to see a show because of the rare lineup. And in the case of these completely simpatico artists, it’s a shame someone ends up playing in the invariably ignominious position of “warm-up.” Young, of course, still maintains a stadium-sized contingent of dope-smoking longhairs who need to be accomodated as they holler for “The Needle and the Damage Done” or “Hey, Hey, My, My” (or whatever that silly song is called) or even “Keep On Rockin’ (in the Free World).” On the other hand Williams may not have reached the natural peak in her audience with her brilliant and drawling post-feminist approach to grunge country. Target Center, 600 1st Ave. N., (612) 673-0900, targetcenter.com

That’s not a typo—terroir is a French term roughly meaning “soil” that has less to do with the current geopolitical bugbear than Farrar’s ongoing fascination with American culture and traditions. A song cycle about Farrar’s new hometown of St. Louis, it’s a solid piece of work that builds well on his earlier solo records and full-band alt-country projects with Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt. Terroir filters his trademark folk-twang sound through the blues, French and Indian influences of his Missourian city. As you might expect, it’s ruminative and melancholy—more than usual, in fact, since some of the songs here find Farrar working through the recent death of his father.

Annie Lennox has not been terribly prolific in the years since she left the great ’80s art-pop duo Eurythmics at the beginning of the last decade. Solo, she brought us the sophisticated and occasionally wonderful Diva, and a dreadful covers album called Medusa, aptly named in that it turned the hearts of most critics to stone. In 1999, she and fellow Eurythmic Dave Stewart reunited for the solidly urbane Peace, but Bare finds her going her own way again. It’s a downbeat bit of business, a breakup record that works best with the lights dimmed and a glass of red wine. That’s not a bad thing; her smoky voice is well-suited to the slow-burning torch songs, though the defiant “Bitter Pills” makes us wish the rest of the record had a touch more verve.

Great artists often reach an apotheosis in their careers beyond which they can do what ever they want. Radiohead managed that with OK Computer back in 2000, then followed up with Kid A, which was a low-rent, high-profile slumming in Aphex Twin territory, indulging in noise more than music. Which is fine—we’re as amenable to “sound experiments” as the next guy. But we couldn’t help feeling like Thom Yorke and company were ignoring their core competency in writing soaring and intellectual pop as hummable as it was thinkable. This new one represents a truce between experimentalism and the irrepressible urge to just write a singalong. Recommended for its longevity in your sub-collection of albums to which you actually listen.

This third installment in the BBC’s amazingly lifelike recreations of the ancient world doesn’t live up to the high standard set by its predecessors, Walking With Dinosaurs and Walking With Prehistoric Beasts, which combined cutting-edge paleontology and computer graphics to stunning effect. Which is a pity, because the story it has to tell is uniquely compelling—how a bunch of scrawny, hairy chimp-like creatures could have grown up into the planet-dominating sophisticates we are today, with our SUVs and televised sitcoms and Miracle Whip. We begin with Lucy the Australopithecus, anthropology’s most famous find and part of the group that first walked upright, showing that the first step in being human is learning to stand up for yourself. Cavemen is choppier than earlier installments and lurches confusingly through time, trying to structure the narrative around the evolution of each human trait rather than a simpler chronological progression of species. On the plus side, the makeup and acting is terrific; each species of protohuman has its own unique character, and it’s surprising to discover from the supplementary video that the same dozen-odd actors have been playing all the roles.

These things become familiar, of course, but how shocking a really moral film like this was, in 1985. Stephen Frears’ snapshot of the 80s was out of tune with its time, but slowly built as an art-house video cult in the 90s. Which is to say, by the time conversations about “identity politics” and “victim culture” had lost enough heat to be handled thoughtfully and seriously. My Beautiful Laundrette isn’t much of a story beyond its intricate web of relationships—including a wonderfully complex romance between Daniel Day-Lewis and Gordon Warnecke. As such, its success rests solely in its spectacular script—one of those movies you’re sure is based on a great novel, though it’s not.